We knew this was a mistake before we tried it. We had discussed it, agreed it would probably make things worse, and then tried it anyway because we were out of other ideas and it seemed logical in the moment.
The rule was simple: eat something healthy first, then you can have what you want.
The execution was not simple.
My son’s relationship with this rule was adversarial from day one. The negotiations started immediately and never really stopped. How much of the healthy thing counted? What qualified as healthy? Could he have the cereal first and the healthy thing after? What if he ate the healthy thing but didn’t finish every last crumb of it? What if he had half a bowl of cereal instead of a full bowl, could he eat less healthy thing?
One evening he argued, with complete seriousness and genuine conviction, that a single piece of lettuce constituted a healthy food and therefore satisfied the requirement. He stood by this position for ten minutes. When I tried to encourage him to try it with some dressing and maybe part of a tomato, all I got was a look of betrayal.
The oatmeal incident was worse. I had made a reasonable bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. He did not want oatmeal. The first bowl I put a little brown sugar and cinnamon in it, thinking that would be more enjoyable. He was not amused, wouldn’t even touch the oatmeal with ‘dirt’ in it. So I made him a plain bowl, untainted by dirt. What followed was a negotiation about how much oatmeal he needed to eat before he could have cereal, which I thought we had resolved. But the bowl seemed to be emptying unusually fast for a child who was visibly not eating. I went back to making his lunch - or so I told him - and peeked over the top of the oven as his spoon dipped below the table with every bite, then came back up conspicuously empty. I let it go on for a few rounds before I said anything. When I did, he looked up, completely calm. His pockets were full of oatmeal.
His pants were wet through.
It was laundry day, and at that moment he had no clean pants. He spent the rest of the morning in his underwear because, in his words, “shorts are too cold.” He maintained throughout that this was an acceptable outcome.
My daughter’s approach was different, and in some ways harder to navigate. She would simply choose to go hungry rather than eat the healthy thing. Not as a protest exactly - more as a quiet, matter-of-fact assessment that the food on offer was not worth the cost. We held out a few times. She outlasted us every time.
We usually gave in and let her have plain white rice or pasta noodles. Some battles are not worth the dinner table.
The overnight oats incident was the exception. I had made overnight oats at the request of both kids - a reasonable, genuinely good breakfast that she had tolerated before. She looked at the bowl. She looked at me. She said she would eat it, but only if she could have one handful of chocolate shavings first. We have these in the house, a common breakfast topping here in the Netherlands. The chocolate, she explained, would make it possible for her to eat the healthy food, and therefore the chocolate itself was functioning as a healthy choice.
She presented this with the calm confidence of someone who had already worked out the logic and was simply informing me of her conclusion.
Reader, she got the chocolate. She ate the oats.
This strategy faded out slowly rather than ending on any particular night. It’s still something we reach for occasionally, out of habit more than hope. When we do, dinner gets louder - more whining, more negotiating, the specific kind of yelling that only happens at the dinner table. It doesn’t work better than it ever did. We just forget, sometimes, that we already tried this.
That’s probably worth writing down.